News: Project launch February, 2013

IPM relies on new technical content but also on effective learning approaches to innovation. ‘New Advisers' is a project that will promote new ways of delivering farm advice. Discussion groups, problem-based learning, clear vision, and forum theatre are among the learning methods that will be tested by farm advisors in eight European countries. ENDURE welcomes this refreshing input and will collaborate with New Advisers to build synergies between the two groups.

New Advisers is a Leonardo da Vinci European project bringing together partners from:

The group will develop learning approaches enabling farm advisers and trainers to more efficiently build local solutions around the pesticide issue. The project breaks away from the idea that ready-made technological packages need to be mechanically transferred wholesale from sources of knowledge to end users. Rather, it embraces the view that complexity, rapid and permanent change, the uniqueness of each individual farmer’s situation, perceptions of multiple stakeholders and human factors such as trust-building, all need to be taken into account. Effective delivery of advice and training is a learning process that depends on the points of view of individual farmers moulded by their interactions with their own business, crop, environment and personal projects. Trust in oneself and in others, trust in one’s ability to create new situations and to come up with new answers enable change. The points of view of other stakeholders on their farm, farming practices, outputs, services rendered are of interest to farmers and represent opportunities to think outside the box and consider their systems from an external viewpoint.

New Advisers combines agronomic advice and training with inputs from other disciplines such Education and Sociology of organisations to equip trainers and advisers with renewed tools and methods that can be adjusted according to the audience and local circumstances. It will test, evaluate and fine-tune candidate innovative learning methods in the countries covered by the project. The methods will be assessed against their ability to enable mobilisation of expertise and skills, access to scientific knowledge, integration within information chains and confidence regarding delivery of quality advice. The innovative educational resources emerging from this experience will be made available on the ENDURE website alongside our
IPM Training Guide and in the
ENDURE Information Centre as well as on the
European Leonardo website named Adam.